Consensus and fragmentation in academic publication preferences

Abstract

Academic publishing requires solving a collective coordination problem: among thousands of possible publication venues, which deserve a community's attention? A clear consensus helps scholars allocate attention, match submissions to appropriate outlets, and evaluate scholars for hiring and promotion. Yet preferences are not centrally coordinated--they emerge within each field over time. Here we ask whether all fields have arrived at similar solutions to this coordination problem, and whether preferences vary systematically with individual characteristics. Using an adaptive survey of 3,510 US tenure-track faculty yielding 163,002 pairwise comparisons across 8,044 venues, we show that fields occupy a wide spectrum of coordination. Economics, Chemistry, and Physics exhibit strong consensus, with respondents agreeing on elite venues and accurately predicting one another's choices. Computer Science and Engineering show fragmented preferences distributed across hundreds of outlets with minimal overlap. Within fields, preferences correlate with institutional prestige--faculty at elite institutions prefer higher-ranked venues--and with gender, as men prefer higher-ranked venues than women even after accounting for prestige and career stage. Scholars realize their personal preferences more successfully than their respective fields' consensus preferences, indicating that heterogeneity, not just selective hierarchy, shapes publishing outcomes. Journal Impact Factors explain only 64% of preference choices, systematically undervaluing what fields actually prefer. These results quantify how publication preferences vary across the structural diversity of academic fields.

Figures (25)

• Figure 1: Fields vary widely in the diversity of their consideration sets and consensus around common venues. (A) Venue accumulation curves show the growing number of unique venues among the combined consideration sets of an increasing number of respondents, sampled uniformly at random without replacement for each field and averaged over $100$ realizations. Circles and labels indicate the total number of respondents and unique venues selected for each field. (B) Within-field overlap quantifies the average percentage of respondents in each field that have selected venues chosen by others in their field. (C) For each of the three most commonly selected venues in each field, an annotated heatmap shows the percentage of respondents per field who selected that venue. Annotations are suppressed for values under 10%.
• Figure 2: Fields vary widely in their consensus around top-5 venues and the general alignment of their preferences. Whether one uses a field-level ranking constructed from the pairwise comparisons of all respondents in a field to predict an individual's pairwise comparisons (horizontal axis) or assesses the degree to which individuals in a field agree on a top-5 (vertical axis), some fields (e.g. Economics) demonstrate a much more overlapping and organized set of preferences than others (e.g. Computer science).
• Figure 3: Preference network embeddings for four fields arranged from low to high consensus. Network embeddings illustrate variation in consideration set and preference similarity by field, derived from 50 randomly chosen respondents in each field. Venues (circles) are sized by the frequencies with which they appear in consideration sets, and are vertically positioned by field-level preference scores. Links (lines) are drawn to connect each respondent's first-ranked venue to their second-ranked venue to their third-ranked venue, and so on, allowing nodes to find horizontal positions via a force-directed graph layout. See SI Appendix, Fig. \ref{['sfig:network-sketches']} for networks for all fields.
• Figure 4: Variation in top preferences and top aspirations by prestige and gender. (A,B) Mean 0-to-1 normalized field-level rank of respondents top preferences and top aspirations, binned by institutional prestige decile and by gender. (C-F) Multiple linear regression coefficients showing the association between (C,D) a one-decile increase in institutional prestige (E,F) men vs women, for top preferences and top aspirations, controlling for career stage, with fields and sample sizes indicated. Error bars represent $95\%$ confidence intervals, with color indicating statistical significant $\alpha=0.05$, and grey indicating n.s. Asterisks indicate statistical significance via two-sided $z$-test, $^{***}$$p=1.0\times 10^{-6}$, $^{**}$$p=2.2\times 10^{-3}$.
• Figure 5: Preference realization varies by institutional prestige and reference group. (A) The average fraction of top-5 venues found in respondent's publication records---a measure of preference realization---is stratified by prestige decile, and separated by which reference group defines the top-5. Solid markers use each individual respondent's top-5, and open markers use field-level top-5. Diamond markers indicate values at the highest prestige decile, to indicate they are comparable to panel B. (B) Post-regression estimates of preference realization in the top-prestige decile for individual top-5 (solid marker) and field-level (open marker) top-5. Brackets and asterisks indicate a significant difference in means (Benjamini-Hochberg corrected for multiple comparisons; $\alpha=0.01$); n.s., not significant. See SI Appendix, Table \ref{['stab:top5_regression_results']} for complete regression table.